Caching and Layering mechanism

Caching mechanism

Ansible bender has a caching mechanism. It is enabled by default. ab caches task results (=images). If a task content did not change and the base image is the same, the layer is loaded from cache instead of being processed again. This doesn’t work correctly with tasks which process file: ab doesn’t handle files yet.

You are able to control caching in two ways:

• disable it completely by running ab build --no-cache

• or adding a tag to your task named no-cache — ab detects such tag and will not try to load from cache

Layering mechanism

When building your image by default, every task (except for setup) is being cached as an image layer. This may have bad consequences on storage and security: there may be things which you didn’t want to have cached nor stored in a layer (certificates, package manager metadata, build artifacts).

ab allows you to easily disable layering mechanism. All you need to do is to add a tag stop-layering to a task which will disable layering (and caching) for that task and all the following ones.